What did I learn today?
The motion lab and proportion activity were great! It was interesting to find that the time for the pendulum doesn't change for the period swing; it is the speed the changes :) Crows apparently have great memories - they say elephants have great memories... The vocabulary refresher is always good, especially since we are focusing on vocabulary district-wide.
What questions do I still have with regard to content, technology, and pedagogy?
Comment - our group is discussing how we can get some of this technology into our school... a work in progress, but we think we could get one set and share it among the group :)
How can I apply this to classroom practice?
The students would like creating graphs to match those on a handout and also would enjoy the challenge of matching a graph.
The proportion lab with Mark would be a good activity to engage students in learning proportions and ratios :)
The vocabulary worksheet can be used to determine which vocabulary words need clarification and specific teaching. For some of our content areas it is difficult to eliminate/cut vocabulary... thoughts?
Great vocabulary question! I think the task of cutting out extraneous words is easier once I've first decided which words are essential in terms of math concepts and the content of the lesson. Once the relatively small set of essential words is established, I can then look at the rest of the lesson and reading materials and decide which words don't add to the conceptual understanding of the lesson--and get rid of them.
ReplyDeleteThe crow lesson used the term 'conjecture', for example. If students were familiar with the word hypothesis/hypothesize, then perhaps 'conjecture' could be eliminated for the sake of clarity. 'Gastropod' was another clear example, especially since 'whelk' was introduced earlier in the lesson. No need for both.
Tony